What is PHP

Author: Paul Slavic

PHP is a tool to make live websites

PHP is used when you need to provide live content for your website. For example, when a visitor submits a form, the data are often handled by a PHP script. Web forums, blogs, web mail, dynamic websites rely on PHP to provide live, database driven content.

PHP works behind the scenes, on the server side. It is a script language that interpreters programmer's instructions and converts them to the HTML code. User's browser doesn't know that it deals with PHP, it just sees the HTML code sent from the server.

Typically PHP is used together with a database system, such as PostgreSQL or Mysql. On the other hand, PHP has a lot of other modules, which significantly extent its functionality. For instance, you can create PDF files on the fly, generate images, connect to other websites and get some data from them.

PHP is a tool to automate Windows tasks

Thanks to the programs like Script GUI, PHP can be used as a tool to automate various tasks you have to deal with regularly. Being much more powerful than traditional ".bat" file language, and having lots of various modules to automate almost everything you want, PHP scripts can have GUI that can be easily created with HTML.

With PHP you can do lots of things:

Batch rename or timestamp files
Do batch text replace
Modify PDF and MS Office files
Automate retrieving / submitting information to websites
Parse HTML code using HTML DOM module
Connect and get messages from POP3 and IMAP mailboxes
Connect to databases, including ODBC, MS SQL, SQLite, etc
Generate and manipulate images, for example, add website name to them
Extract and manipulate ID3 tags from MP3 files
Script ActiveX controls
Manipulate XML data
Compress / decompress data
Compare directories using file hashes
Automate printing
Extract information from webservices via SOAP protocol

This makes PHP an excellent free alternative to languages like VisualBasic and with Script GUI you can easily have graphic user interface.

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